THURSTON, ROBERT HENRY

(b. Providence, Rhode Island, 25 October 1839; d. Ithaca, New York, 25 October 1903)

engineering education, steam engineering, testing of materials.

Thurston was a mechanical engineer who exerted wide and lasting influence upon the American engineering profession. He was a prolific writer of textbooks, reference works, and technical and popular articles; and he organized and directed two mechanical engineering schools. In addition he organized and was an active member of professional societies and served on industrial and governmental committees.

Thurston was the eldest of the three children of Robert Lawton Thurston, a prominent steam-engine builder in Providence, and Harriet Taylor. Upon completion of high school, Thurston was expected to enter his father’s shops; but he and his father were persuaded by one of his teachers that he should continue his education at Brown University, where he graduated in 1859 with a major in science and a minor in civil engineering.

After a short period as draftsman, Thurston represented his father’s company in Philadelphia, where in 1861 his first published article appeared in the Journal of the Franklin Institute. Throughout the Civil War (1861–1865), he served as an assistant engineer in the navy, and at the end of the war he was assigned to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis as assistant professor of natural and experimental philosophy. The pattern of his subsequent career was evident in his six years of teaching at the academy. Upon the death of the incumbent, he became head of his department. He designed and built a signaling lamp; experimented with lubricants; and published a number of descriptive technical reports and popular articles on naval armament, steam engines, and the manufacture of iron and steel.

Henry Morton, former editor of the Journal of the Franklin Institute and president of the newly formed Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, invited Thurston to organize and to direct the school of mechanical engineering. It was during his fourteen years (1871–1885) at the institute that Thurston established his international reputation. In 1874 he persuaded the trustees of Stevens to equip a testing laboratory to serve commercial clients. Subsequently, laboratory work became a part of the engineering curriculum.

While teaching, Thurston invented testing machines and carried out extensive research on strength of materials and lubrication. He was one of the first to demonstrate that the elastic limit of ductile materials can be raised by the application of stress beyond the yield point. His series of public lectures on the history of the steam engine, published several years later, in 1878, was long a standard work on the subject. Major works-which were derived from his classroom lectures on materials of engineering, friction, and lubrication-were published while Thurston was at Stevens. During this period Thurston wrote large books on steam boilers and the steam engine. He served also as secretary of the U.S. Board to Test Iron, Steel, and Other Metals: as U.S. Commissioner to the 1873 Vienna International Exhibition; as an official of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition; and as first president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, which in 1880 he helped organize. He also published an extraordinary number of both technical and popular articles.

In 1885 Thurston moved to Cornell University, where he reorganized and directed the Sibley College of Mechanical Engineering. Through his publications and the considerable number of Cornell graduates who became teachers in engineering colleges throughout the country, Thurston influenced greatly the philosophy and direction of engineering education. In an engineering school he expected to treat only professional subjects and to relegate general education to a preparatory school. He considered general education as desirable but not essential; his successors gave only lip service to its desirability. Thurston suggested in 1893 (“Technical Education in the United States.” p. 923n) that the ideal technical education was probably to be found in the military academies, where scientific and professional studies and physical training were all given due weight.

Thurston was diligent, enthusiastic, and persistent, and tended toward action rather than reflection. He made massive contributions to the order and the promulgation of the engineering sciences and to the promotion of organizations that were directed toward the increase of material wealth in a progress-oriented social order.

He was a member or honorary member of a score of technical societies in the United States and Europe. He received honorary degrees from Stevens Institute of Technology (1885) and Brown University (1889). Thurston was married in 1865 and. upon the death of his wife, remarried in 1880.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Thurston edited Reports of the Commissioners of the United States to the International Exhibition Held at Vienna 1873, 4 vols. (Washington, 1875–1876). His other works include A History of the Growth of the Steam-Engine (New York, 1878); The Materials of Engineering, 3 vols. (New York, 1883–1884); A Treatise on Friction and Lost Work in Machinery and Millwork (New York, 1885); A Manual of Steam-Boilers, Their Design, Construction, and Operation (New York, 1888); Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (New York, 1890), a trans. of N. L. S. Carnot, Reflexions sur la Puissance Motrice du Feu (1824); A Manual of the Steam-Engine: For Engineers and Technical Schools, 2 vols. (New York, 1891): Robert Fulton, His Life and Its Results (New York, 1891); “Technical Education in the United States,” in Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers,14 (1893), 855–1013; and The Animal as a Machine and a Prime Motor, and the Laws of Energetics (New York, 1894). A list of Thurston’s writings is in Durand’s biography (see below), pp. 245–287.

II. Secondary Literature. William F. Durand, Robert Henry Thurston (New York, 1929), is an uncritical but informative biography by a former associate and friend: a portrait appears as the frontispiece. See also Durand’s article on Thurston in Dictionary of American Biography.9 (1936), 518-520. A context is provided for Thurston’s work in education and in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in Monte Calvert. Mechanical Engineering in America, 1830–1910 (Baltimore, 1967). Thurston’s correspondence is in the Cornell University Library, Collection of Regional History and University Archives.

Eugene S. Ferguson